Excerpts from Dharampal Ji’s book Essays on Tradition, Recovery and Freedom (Volume 5 of the Collected Writings)

Indian civilisation rests upon certain inner certainties — visions that give coherence to its society and confidence to its people. That anchoring vision once lay in the idea of Purusha — the Cosmic Being whose body symbolised the entire creation. From this vision arose the concept of varna, not as a hierarchy of birth or privilege, but as a poetic articulation of interdependence — a reminder that every function, from head to feet, shared equally in the sanctity of the Divine Whole. Over centuries, this organic understanding began to fade. A civilisation that once saw unity in diversity gradually learned to read division into unity. The colonial encounter deepened this rupture: through the politics of representation, the language of “cards” and “communities,” India’s natural pluralism was recast into compartments of power and grievance. The living texture of jati and varna, once woven into the rhythms of locality and vocation, became rigid categories in administrative registers and political bargains.

The following reflections, drawn from Dharampal Ji’s book “Essays on Tradition, Recovery and Freedom” (Volume 5^th of Collected writings), trace this slow but profound dislocation — the movement from a civilisational harmony to a fragmented social order.

“The Purusha Sukta indeed states that the Sudras appeared from the feet of Brahman, the Vaisyas from the thighs, the Kshatriyas from the arms and the Brahmanas from the head. But this does not necessarily define a hierarchy between the varnas. The Sukta is a statement of the identity of the microcosm and the macrocosm. It presents the world as an extension of the body of Brahman. In its cryptic Vedic style, the Sukta informs us that the creation is a manifestation of Brahman. It is His extension, His play. The Sukta also probably recounts the variety of tasks that have to be performed in the world that Brahman creates. But nowhere in the Purusha Sukta is it said that some of these tasks, and consequently the performers of those tasks, are better than others. That the functions of the head are higher than those of the feet could only be a matter of a somewhat literal interpretation that came later. At another time, such interpretations can even get reversed. After all, it is only on his feet that a man stands securely on earth. It is only when the feet are stable that the head and hands play their parts. When the feet are not securely placed on the earth, nothing else remains secure either.

Incidentally, the Purusha Sukta does not even imply that all four varnas came into existence simultaneously at the beginning of creation. The Sukta does not give the story of creation and its unfolding—it only explains, through the analogy of the body of Brahman, an already manifest and differentiated universe. In fact, as we have seen earlier, the pauranic texts seem to suggest that at the beginning there was only one varna, and it is only later, as the need for newer and newer human capacities started arising, that the varnas divided, first into two and then into three and four.”

Article: Bharatiya Chitta Manas and Kala (page : 164-165)

“A few years ago, the then Governor of Andhra Pradesh visited the Sankaracharya of Sringeri. During their conversation, a reference to the varna vyavastha arose in some context, and the Sankaracharya started explaining different facets of this vyavastha to the Governor. At this the Governor advised the Acharya that he should avoid talking about the varna arrangement. And the Sringeri Acharya fell silent. Later, relating the incident to his junior Acharya, he regretted that India had reached a state, where the Acharyas could not even talk about varna.

In a functioning society, such an incident would seem rather odd. The oddity is not related to the validity or otherwise of the varna arrangement. There can of course be many different opinions about that. But a Governor asking a Sankaracharya to stop referring to the varna vyavastha is a different matter. In a society rooted in its traditions and aware of its civilisational moorings, this dialogue between a head of the State and a religious leader would be hard to imagine. Saints are not asked to keep quiet by governors, except in societies that have completely lost their anchorage.

Religious leaders are not supposed to be answerable to the heads of the State. Their answerability is only to their tradition and to the community of their disciples. It is part of their calling to interpret the tradition, and to give voice to the chitta and kala of their society, according to their understanding. No functioning societies can afford to curb them in their interpretations and articulations.”

Article: Bharatiya Chitta Manas and Kala (page : 184-185)

“In 1942, at the time the British were engaged in the armed suppression of the Quit India movement, a leader of the scheduled castes submitted a memorandum to the British and offered his support to them. The British Secretary of State for India had then written to the British Viceroy, that till then the British had one card, i.e. the Muslim card against Indian nationalism; but now, after this memorandum, they had a second card in the scheduled castes.

The old game of acquiring such cards began to be played around the 1870s in a new way. Scholarship came to the aid of authority and began to create new images for the Indian Muslims, for the Sikhs, and also for some of the Hindu jatis. Great Christian sympathy began to be displayed, especially for the pariars of the Tamil areas, and other untouchable groups of Hindu society in various parts of India. In fact groups which had been historically opposed to one another like the pariars and the chakkiliars of the Tamil areas began to be clubbed together initially under the title pariars, and later under the more extended term the scheduled castes. (The pariars in south India had belonged to what were known as the Valangai—right hand— castes and were their guardsmen; while the chakkiliars had belonged to the opposite Idangai—left hand—castes group, and had been the guardsmen for them). The process in due time led to the inclusion of many jatis in the ‘untouchable’ category. Till at least the mid-nineteenth century, these had not been treated or labelled as such by Indian society.

Another British card was to placate the increasing number of westernised Indians: to divert their discontent and their sense of discrimination into safer channels. The purpose was to detach all possible such groups from the larger indigenous Indian polity and thus to reduce the possibility of another 1857–1858. It was then felt that one such safe channel could be a conservative- cum-moderate political platform where the grievances of the vocal westernised could be aired more publicly and thus reduce the chances of their aligning themselves with their own people. This led to the formation of the Indian National Congress under the patronage of liberal Englishmen and loyal and prosperous Indian subjects. This new card seems to have worked effectively for quite sometime and did help separate most of the westernised Indians from their own people. Most of the former only wished to be treated as English gentry.

Article: India’s Polity, its Characteristics and Current Problems (page : 121-122)

The nature of the non-European societies and the distinctive impact upon them can perhaps be well illustrated by a reference to India. One of the major characteristics of India has been its emphasis on communities based on shared localities as well as relations of kinship termed as jatis, in contrast to the preference for individuation in non-Slav Europe. The number of localities in the India of 1947 was around 7,00,000. Their number a thousand or two thousand years earlier, might not have been very different. The number of the main jatis, sometimes with different names in differing regions of India, is, however, not more than one hundred. One of the characteristics of a jati is the sharing of one or more specific occupations amongst those who at some earlier period would have got admitted to it. A sort of interrelatedness or complementarity of the jatis and also of localities makes up Indian society. This not only applies to the Hindus, who even today form some 85 per cent of the Indian people, those who have been converted to Islam and Christianity in the past 800 and 200 years respectively are organised and interlinked more or less similarly.”

Book: Rediscovering India

Article: Europe and the non-European since – 1492